Find Tactical Leverage
There are two types of knowledge work, exploring and exploiting.
Exploring is turning fuzziness into clarity. It's figuring out which direction to head when you don't know if you should go North, South, East, or West. The leverage in exploring is finding the coordinates that grow the business most. This is strategic leverage.
Exploiting is doing the actual work to get to those coordinates. The leverage in exploiting is how quickly you can reach your destination. This is tactical leverage.
The work of exploiting is fundamentally different than it was five years ago because the variance in execution time has exploded. The same task that used to take a week might take four hours with the right AI tool. Even better, if you build it as an extensible system, that week-long quarterly task now takes a couple hours.
This topic is only starting to be explored because exploitation work never used to have much variance. A good Excel formula could speed things up 2-3x, but you weren't leaving days on the table. Now it feels more on the order of 10-100x.
When I wake up every morning, my office is 90 minutes away on foot. But I never walk, I bike there in 15 minutes. This choice is obvious because the commute is repeatable and the tools are known (Google Maps tells me exactly how long each option takes). Everyone optimizes their commute. Few think about their work the same way.
Two months ago, I joined as the first growth hire at a 7 person startup in SF. My goal is to grow revenue. I quickly saw that a significant percentage of our business came from migrating customers off Loopio, a legacy competitor in our space. If I could find everyone using Loopio, I'd have a qualified list of our highest-value prospects.
I started poking around and discovered that if you type [customerName].loopio.com into your browser, it redirects to that customer's login page. Type ncino.loopio.com and you hit Ncino's portal. This meant I could verify Loopio customers programmatically.
I pulled 6,000 enterprise SaaS companies from Pitchbook. The data was messy (companies listed as "Acme (financial services)" or ticker symbols like "SNOW"). I used ChatGPT to clean the names and generate clickable URLs in a CSV.
My first thought was to use AI computer use tools. I spun up Browserbase's Director, OpenAI's Operator, and Perplexity's Comet simultaneously and gave them 250 URLs each.
Twenty minutes later:
- Browserbase: 7 companies found
- Operator: 3 companies found
- Comet: 2 companies found
I manually clicked through the same 250 URLs to check. I found 27 verified customers. The AI tools weren't reliable enough yet. I'd found a bike, but it had a flat tire. So I gave up and started walking, manually clicking through each URL.
After about 1,000 URLs, I couldn't take it anymore. I was going numb from the repetition. I decided to try writing a Python script. An hour later, I had a functional script and used it to check all 6,000 companies in twenty minutes. I found 287 of our highest-quality prospects.
Since then, I've run the script through an additional 30,000 companies, spending no more than a couple minutes setting it up. Today, I have a list of 688 Loopio customers. At our ACV of $40k, that's $27.5m in potential ARR.
Once I found the company.loopio.com insight, building a list of Loopio customers was inevitable. But the script saved me days and gave me a reusable tool. It also let me run through more companies than I otherwise would've because it's so easy to just run the script.
The learning from building the Loopio script helped me identify a similar strategy for Responsive, the other legacy player in our market. I now have a list of 208 verified Responsive customers using the same approach. The tactical leverage from the first project taught me where to look for the next one.
This is tactical leverage. Everything you do, think about what tooling will get you to your destination quickest. In the world of AI, there are so many different tools that can move you 10-100x faster.
As a growth engineer, here are the tools I've been using to find tactical leverage:
- Claude - daily driver
- Cursor - building scripts
- Clay - enriching companies
- n8n - repeatable workflows
- Apify - scraping the web
- Playwright - running browsers in headless mode
- Firecrawl - scraping the web
TLDR: Find tactical leverage.
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Why I'm writing publicly
I began writing in college after stumbling on Paul Graham’s Putting Ideas into Words. I found that writing is the great clarifier. Thoughts are often half-baked in your head, and only when you challenge yourself to write them down do you realize their incompleteness.
Since reading that essay, I've used writing to clarify my thoughts in Obsidian, a note-taking platform. I used to maintain it carefully, but since starting my first job, I've only found time for weekly reflections.
I'm turning to public writing as my accountability mechanism for producing high-quality work. You're my accountability buddy, so thank you.